Interesting Ho Chi Minh Quotes: The Art of Deception

In the spirit of our new “Quotes” section, here are some interesting quotes by the infamous Ho Chi Minh. You’ll be surprised at what the main message in his words are. Just so you know, it’s not Communism.

“The Vietnamese people deeply love independence, freedom, and peace. But in the face of United States aggression, they have risen up, united as one man.”

“Love other human beings as you would love yourself.”

“Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.”

“It was patriotism, not Communism, that inspired me.”

“I only follow one party: the Vietnamese Party.”

Surprised? Ho Chi Minh was a political genius, tricking everyone into believing his lies. Using patriotism, nationalism, and the pretext of fighting for freedom, Ho Chi Minh demonized the Americans and defeated them in the war. It is true, Ho Chi Minh was an inspiring man. He was a charismatic individual who was able to gain support from many people inside and outside of Vietnam. However, actions speak louder than words. The crimes he committed against humanity have clearly been proven. He was a criminal, not a patriot. Thanks to him, Vietnam is now going through a phase of decline and self-destruction. He is not the hero that we all thought he was. However, I will acknowledge his title as the master of deception. He’s a tricky one.

History is written by the winners, in this case the Vietnamese. We Americans can’t accept defeat, so we demonize the patron saint of Vietnam, a man who emulated our own Thomas Jefferson. Ho Chi Minh told us that he and his people could wait a thousand years for victory. The USA could not. He said we could kill ten of his people for every one of ours, and in the end they would win. He was right again. Yet, American hubris and arrogance insists that we can win in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Libya if only …

What you just said is enough to prove that Ho Chi Minh did not care about Vietnamese ‘s lives , that he was a communist , like Lenin , Stalin , Mao tse Tung . To deal with communists , please look at what they DO , not what they SAY. Right after they signed Peace agreement in Geneva 7/1954 , they started the war plan to attack south Vietnam. In 1/1973 , they signed the same kind of agreement , then started to attack south Vietnam when The U.S withrew all U.S. troops out of VN.

The wars show how uncaring Ho was. He knew the US would kill millions of Vietnamese to bring them the same peace, justice, tranquility as we brought Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico,the Seminoles, Creeks and Sioux in the past

We should debate the American Indian Wars on a website that is about the American Indians. We should debate the Mexican War and the “Banana” Wars on a website that is focused on Latin America. On this website, however, the subject is Viet Nam. The American Indian Wars have almost nothing to do with Viet Nam.

If you have studied vietnamese history, particularly the french occupation, then you would understand the absurdity of what you are stating.

Vietnam suffered almost 70 years of rampant french pillaging and ransacking, during which time the literacy rate dived, the majority of the people were forced off their land and into plantations/mines, and the country suffered several devastating famines, including 1917, and the 1944-1945 famine. In addition, french foriegn legionairies killed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people as anti-resistance operations, massacre and reverse decimation (killing 9 out of 10 in a village) being among their methods.

During this period, there was not one time when there were not several highly educated, rational, nationalistic leaders struggling for independence. Phan Dinh Phung being one of the first, Ho being the last.

Ho valued the American ideal strongly. The US declaration of independence was quoted several times in the Vietnamese one. It was global political events, not the will to become a mini-stalin, that forced the majority of nationalistic parties to embrace comunism, as it became apparent that the “free world” supported french occupation, and with a communist russia and china to the north, it was a move of pragmatism in order to secure allies rather than a strictly ideological one.

Vietnam is more prosperous now than it has been in almost 200 years. After the US did their best to destroy the country with heavy, indiscriminate strategical bombing, and more than a 2 decade long war against a sequence of foreign occupiers, i find their recovery an example to the rest of the world. I know because i live in Laos, the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world, also part of french indochina.

I hope that you will revise your position and research the issue closely before you post again.

South Vietnam was one of the most economically industrialized countries in Southeast Asia at the time. Had it not been for the stupid Communist dismantling the economic foundations and accomplishments of the south, Vietnam today would be so much better off than it is now.

Vietnam 200 years ago was the most powerful country in the region. It was more literate than most european countries at the time, and had a highly developed civil service.

Vietnam remains a huge example of how not to do an industrial revolution as it pratically killed vietnamese culture and living standards.

I do not defend the actions of the present regime in vietnam, only pointing out that the impact of the french was far worse than any communist one, and that Ho, being one of the most influential revolutionary leaders of the 20th centuary does not deserve this slander. his successors are a different story.

I’m a Vietnam veteran, and I am very happy VN has rebounded and that it actually has become a tourist destination for US people. Now, after 40 years, I can see simply that Ho, and Vo Nguyen Giap, were mainly seeking independence, and they ended up with the communists because we did not support them, and neither did the other Allies of France. Had we done so, history would have changed.

For anyone still believing the US revisionist myths about Vietnam please read Embers of War, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winner for History. FDR despised de Gaulle; he would never have allowed French recolinization, if Truman had listened, if, if, if…

in reply to George Luce, Denver, CO Says:
June 22, 2011 at 11:55 am
have you accepted defeat ? you speak openly, honestly but not bitterly and in contempt of what had happened.
people will always be bitter in war who wouldn’t be having seen family and friends torn or die for a cause that comes to little, there is no good end to war and Ho Chi Minh was no more a saint than they American leaders, each had blood indirectly on there hands from each form that was signed ordering more of a fight.
Ho Chi Minh fought for his country and America fought because they were in a state of hysteria. No ones aims or agendas were wrong to those people, no one country will every have all its people agree with its actions but both leaders had ordered the attacks that resulted in innocent lives lost, people un-involved in this war.
And both leaders knew that, all leaders know what they must do or say and the consiquences of such actions.

I worked with a Vietnamese kid who was very bitter about Americas abandonment of Viet Nam.
“What are you doing here?” I asked “Shouldn’t you be back there fighting for your cause?”
I was bitter, because when I was 18, I was over in his country, fighting his war while eighteen year old Vietnamese cut our hair, sold us cigarettes…(and a lot more).
They all claimed to be 15 – 17. Their mothers would register them late, to keep them out of the war. That infuriated me. Especially when they responded, “Yeah, but I go in til war is over; you do one year!” BUT IT WAS THEIR COUNTRY!
Ho had resolve. He would NEVER stop! Communist? Capitalist? Fascist? Yes to anything that furthered his cause.
He was a patriot, first.

As a veteran of that era I think one of the United States’ real failures is the lack of support it gave to Vietnam right after WWII. We actually delayed shipping our soldiers home from the Pacific so we could ship French soldiers back to Vietnam to retake the country. This after the Vietnamese helped us to fight the Japanese. I believe Ho actuall started back at the end of WWI trying to get the democratic countries to support independence for Vietnam.

Hey, tell me why Ho Chi Minh is a criminal, also tell me his crimes in details. I know it’s a hard work but if you can give me some, I will prove that you are 200% wrong!
But before that, I am going to teach you a lesson. Now imagine you were a highshool student and got bullied constanly by another strong one. He just asked you to be good and nice to him and ‘OBEY’ him like a good puppy, then he would leave you alone. Would you agree with the deal? Would you be willing to be controlled by him to get ‘peace’ and ‘safety’? Do you think he would leave you alone? Do you think you woud satisfy with a life like that? Tell me. If I were in that situation, I will FIGHT, won’t suffer!
A country is like a ‘person’, a bigger person. There are 196 ‘big people’ on our planet. They all want independence and develop in their own way. Some of them may need help but don’t need brutal interference. No one wants to be violated. Accepting to lose freedom to get ‘peace’ and ‘safety’ is the thought of slaves. Vietnamese of course are not slaves!! And thanks to HO CHI MINH, Vietnamese won independence. Got it?
Lastly, have some search about how Americans did in Vietnam including how much tons of bombs were thown, how prisons were, how Vietcongs were tortured, about Agent Orange and its consequences, etc. Then search for how Vietcongs treated their captured Americans. I believe you can distinguish reliable sources :D. Such torture like throwing manure and rubbish on captured Americans is sooo funny :)). Childish! I can feel how desperate the person trying to make up a torture was :))
_________________________

Bob Turner served in Vietnam in various capacities. He then went on to law school and teaches national security law at the University of Virginia, having also headed up that section for the American Bar Association. Want to be impressed? Read his bio at the link of his name above. Below, he writes about the last days of South Vietnam and what brought them about. This is slightly edited from another piece he recently wrote.

Congress did not totally cut off assistance to South Vietnam in 1975; but as a scholar who has been studying and writing about Vietnam for more than forty-five years (who was the last congressional staff member to leave Vietnam during the April 1975 final evacuation), I can assure you that the U.S. Congress was the most decisive factor in the Communist conquest of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975.

To keep things in context, it is important to note that in the post-war era, Hanoi has repeatedly admitted that its leaders made a decision on May 19, 1959, to open the Ho Chi Minh trail and send tens of thousands of soldiers and countless tons of equipment and supplies south to “liberate” South Vietnam by armed force. That was more than 5 years before the U.S. decided to send combat units to Vietnam, and our purpose was precisely the purpose for which we sent troops into South Korea in 1950 — to uphold the non-aggression principles of the UN Charter and oppose the expansion of Communism by force.

Viet Cong defectors used to laugh and express shock at how successful their campaign to portray the “National Liberation Front” to the west as something other than a classic Leninist “front” organization had been. (Hanoi actually published an English-language translation of the proceedings of the Third Party Congress in 1960, including the resolution it approved calling for “our people” in south Vietnam to set up a front under Party leadership three months before the NLF was allegedly formed by non-Communist resistance leaders in Ben Tre.) American “scholars” who fell for this ruse should be ashamed of themselves.

We also need to keep in mind that the tremendous increase in POL costs resulting from the Arab oil embargo (OPEC raised oil prices 70% in late 1973) meant that to sustain South Vietnam at 1973 levels aid for subsequent years would have to be substantially greater. In reality, in 1975 Saigon got about 20% of the aid we provided in 1973.

I traveled extensively through South Vietnam in 1968, 1970, 1971, and 1974, and I witnessed the effects of the aid cuts in ’74 and when I returned in ’75. Westmoreland claims that South Vietnamese soldiers were authorized one hand grenade per man per month, 85 rounds of ammo per month (about 7 seconds on full-auto in an M-16 — although in reality one would have to change magazines 3-5 times to fire that much ammo). Put another way, that provided about 3 rounds of ammo per day — ironically, the same amount defectors told me they had for the AK-47s following the highly successful 1970 Cambodian incursion, when they were instructed to put away their AK’s and dig up their old M-1 rifles and carbines, FALs, and the other relatively primitive weapons.) Each ARVN 105 mm howitzer was allocated 4 rounds of ammo per day, with only 2 rounds per 155 mm. Many of their tanks, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft were totally useless because of a lack of spare parts and/or fuel. And while Congress was cutting aid to Saigon, Moscow and Beijing were pouring aid into North Vietnam to fuel the war.

The United States made a solemn commitment by treaty in 1955 (when the SEATO Treaty drafted the previous year was ratified by Ike with almost unanimous advice and consent of the Senate–1 senator voted ‘nay’) to come to the aid of any of the “Protocol States” of that treaty requesting assistance in defense of their freedom from Communist aggression. Those “Protocol States” were the States of Vietnam [later the Republic of Vietnam or South Vietnam], Laos, and Cambodia. In August 1964, Congress enacted the Southeast Asian Resolution by a combined vote of 504-2 (a 99.6% majority). John F. Kennedy pledged to the world: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Ironically, the leaders of the “save South Vietnam” drive in the mid-’50s were liberal, internationalist Democrats like Kennedy, Mansfield, and Fulbright.

The congressional action that truly sounded the death knell for South Vietnam and “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” was not simply cutting aid, but passing a law (the FY 1973 Dep’t of State Auth. Act, Pub. L. 93-126, 87 Stat. 451) that provided:

“Notwithstanding any other provision of law, on or after August 15, 1973, no funds heretofore or hereafter appropriated may be obligated or expended to finance the involvement of United States military forces in hostilities in or over or from off the shores of North Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, unless specifically authorized hereafter by Congress.”

As a constitutional scholar who wrote my doctoral dissertation of the separation of national security powers, I believe this provision was flagrantly unconstitutional. But it guaranteed Hanoi and its allies that the United States was not going to fulfill its solemn pledge to defend these victims of aggression, and Pham Van Dong (Hanoi’s Premier) announced that the Americans would not come back “even if we offered them candy.” So Moscow and Beijing greatly increased their aid, Hanoi left only the 325th Division to defend the Hanoi area and sent the rest of its Army behind columns of Soviet-made tanks to conquer South Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia, the other Protocol States we had repeatedly pledged to protect) in a conventional military invasion.

I worked in the Senate (as national security adviser to Sen. Robert P. Griffin, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee) during the final period and sat through the public and closed hearings. I listened as Sen. Mike Mansfield assured some of his colleagues that he had just spoken with Sihanouk (who was in Beijing) by phone and had been assured that when the Khmer Rouge (“Red Cambodians”) seized power in Phnom Penh only a small number of leaders would be killed.

The reason I was back in Vietnam in 1975 was to assist with the orphan lift. The governor of Michigan had declared an “open door” policy, saying Michigan would find homes for any orphans we could rescue. While others in the group worked with South Vietnamese orphanages (ultimately abandoning them and fleeing to Hong Kong in fear), I worked on trying to arrange to rescue orphans in Cambodia on the empty C130 aircraft that each day flew rice into Cambodia. (http://www.virginia.edu/cnsl/images/Turner-CambodiaCable.jpg) I was too late.

The consequences of the congressional decision to betray John Kennedy’s noble promise and the treaty and statutory pledges we had made to protect South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are clear. An estimated 100,000 South Vietnamese were executed, as many as 250,000 more died in “reeducation camps,” and another 45-50,000 died in the “New Economic Zones. Using figures provided by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, an estimated 420,000 “boat people” died at sea fleeing the Communist tyranny in search of freedom. The best figures I’ve seen on Cambodia come from the Yale University Cambodian Genocide Project: 1.7 million Cambodians (more than 20% of the entire population) were killed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge. A January 2004 article on the “killing fields” in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TODAY noted that “bullets were too precious to use for executions. Axes, knives and bamboo sticks were far more common. As for children, their murderers simply battered them against trees.”

What Congress did in 1973-75 was shameful — among the darkest and most immoral years in the history of U.S. foreign policy. It led directly to Soviet intervention in Angola (that began about 1962 — but after we betrayed the non-Communist peoples of Indochina the Soviets started sending in what eventually became more than 400,000 Cuban “volunteers,” promoting a “civil war” that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.) The Soviets authorized “armed struggle” in Central America that cost countless more lives, and an estimated million people died when Moscow invaded Afghanistan.

In the end, as the PENTAGON PAPERS confirmed to anyone who bothered to actually read them (http://www.virginia.edu/cnsl/pdf/Turner-Myths.pdf), the “peace movement” and congressional critics of the war were mistaken almost across the board in their arguments. And the human consequences of their betrayal of America’s honor were catastrophic.

From my perspective as someone who has followed this issue for nearly half-a-century, efforts to claim that Congress was not responsible for allowing the Communists to conquer South Vietnam and its neighbors are as off the mark as efforts to deny the Holocaust.

The American people were horribly misled by the media about what was actually transpiring in Indochina. The 1968 Tet Offensive was a tremendous military defeat for the Communists, and after the May Offensive of that same year the southern “Viet Cong” had ceased to exist as a serious fighting force. Regular North Vietnamese PAVN soldiers took over the fighting, and with only U.S. air support the South Vietnamese successfully blocked their 1972 Spring Offensive. As Prof. John Lewis Gaddis noted in Foreign Affairs in early 2005: “Historians now acknowledge that American counter-insurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict . . . .” Many of us who were there at the time saw that first hand. We broke Hanoi’s will in the Linebacker II operation, and there was a good chance that had we retained the option of returning with our B-52s on Guam we could have enforced the Paris Peace Accords. Hanoi had run out of SAM-2 missiles, and neither Moscow nor Beijing were willing to resupply them militarily — UNTIL they saw Congress throw in the towel.

what is extremely surprising is to see the US involve itself as though it is the custodian of world affairs and general well being(in total contradiction to their inhumane treatment of afro americans at the time).What the war was all about is the fight against imperialism.France and the usa should have left the vietnamese to determine their own destiny instead of forcing their capitalist ideologies.